Archive for » October 5th, 2017«

There’s a lot of talk about how longstanding retailers are making adjustments to appeal to the finicky millennial and Gen-Z consumer, but it’s starting to seem like the ones who succeed are the newer retailers that start out by targeting those demographics to begin with. And we feel pretty confident in predicting that new beauty and lifestyle concept Riley Rose will be one of those success stories. In co-founder Linda Chang’s own words, it’s a literal “homage to millennials.” Of course, that’s pretty clear if you look at any of the store’s branding or social media. Every. Single. Thing. Is. Pink.

Chang launched Riley Rose, the first location of which opened at the Galleria mall in Glendale, a suburb of Los Angeles, last weekend, alongside her sister Esther. The entrepreneurial daughters of Forever 21‘s husband-wife founding team were inspired by concepts and brands they’d encountered while traveling overseas, and set out to present them in a cool way to the U.S. consumer. “We felt like there was a hole in the marketplace; there was not a lifestyle brand that incorporates not just beauty, but home decor and office and other categories and done in a very trendy and Instagram-worthy way.”

Inside Riley Rose. Photo: Courtesy

With experience running various retail departments at Forever 21, and being millennials themselves, they nailed it. The press release for the launch includes phrases like “dream world,” “lifestyle universe” and “high-sensory fantasyland.” Having attended the Jordyn Woods-DJ’d opening event, I can attest that these descriptors aren’t mere hyperbole. Product aside, the store is a brightly lit, Instabait explosion of “millennial pink,” Sans Serif, neon signs, marble, mid century-inspired furnishings and subway tile. The company’s Instagram page is equally cohesive in its pinkness. “That’s an homage to the millennial generation,” Chang explains. “They call it ‘millennial pink; it goes nicely with our name, Riley Rose.” The name, she says, was inspired by a desire to pair two names (a millennial branding trope at this point), one being more “tomboyish” and the other more traditionally feminine. She says that reflects herself (the “Riley”) and her sister (the “Rose”) as well.

Riley Rose is not all branding and no bite, however. The products are good. All the cool, under-the-radar Korean brands your beauty-obsessed friend raves about are there and abundantly stocked, as are a number of other young, cult-y, millennial-targeting U.S. beauty brands; there’s nary a piece of ugly packaging in site. Think: RMS Beauty, Tonymoly, Too Cool for School, Winky Lux, R Co, Stila, CosRx and many more.

There are infinite sheet masks, and a beautiful bar with individual mirrors at which to try out cosmetics and, obviously, take selfies. Chang said she and her sister looked for “brands that we are fans of, but also tried to find some cult beauty brands that have made a fanbase for themselves online but haven’t had a brick and mortar.” She says she thinks Riley Rose and Forever 21 have a similar customer base, but for Riley Rose it’s more generally about “any consumer that is really interested about the newest products, the products that are most talked about from all around the world.”

Inside Riley Rose. Photo: Courtesy

But what’s even more interesting than the store’s endless supply of discoverable beauty products is its substantial assortment of home goods — which were also clearly bought with the millennial consumer in mind. Having a cozy, ‘grammable home is also of increasing importance to this generation and will me made easier by Riley Rose’s buy of chic (but largely affordable) candles, faux succulents, kitchen accessories, picture frames, bathroom containers, bar soaps and much more.

An unexpected, but equally nice addition is the store’s wide assortment of candy, a mix of treats from Asia, Dylan’s Candy Bar, and your standard grocery-store fare. I spent maybe 30-45 minutes in the store and bought something from every category, and there were still several shelves and racks I didn’t have time to look at. Chang says the biggest piece of feedback she’s gotten is that one can spend hours in the store and that’s absolutely true.

Inside Riley Rose. Photo: Courtesy

The Chang sisters are also being thoughtful in the way they interact with consumers, often replying directly to social media comments and questions and actually listening to their feedback and which brands they want them to carry. This, they say, is how Riley Rose will grow and evolve. “One thing I’ve learned from my parents, the success of Forever 21 came about because they were listening to the consumer,” says Chang, explaining how, in the first Forever 21 store, someone came in looking for a purple dress and her parents went out and found some to have in stock. “That attitude is how we became Forever 21; we try to apply that same lesson — listening to what consumers are asking for, bringing all of the great brands people are looking for into the stores.”

The Chang sisters aren’t wasting any time expanding. They have 12 more stores slated to open in the next few months across the country, “from Texas to Maryland to Florida,” with e-commerce set to launch sometime next month. They still plan to keep certain elements (like the candy) exclusive to brick-and-mortar, and target smalls and shopping centers where millennials and Gen-Z-ers will hopefully continue to shop.

Inside Riley Rose. Photo: Courtesy

With the right locations and continued focus on bringing great products to market and listening to consumer feedback, Riley Rose could truly be posed for beauty retail world domination, regardless of the staying power of neon signs and millennial pink.

Q:Most homes in my neighborhood have similar styles inside and out. I want a unique high-end interior design like a custom accent wall. Any advice?

A: Putting a unique stamp on a home is a common desire for people in planned communities, where interiors often repeat a handful of designs. While builders may offer custom interior features when you purchase during the construction stage, afterward it is all on the homeowners.

For unique accent walls, here are two options:

Paint. The simplest and most common upgrade is to paint a single wall as a statement feature using bold colors or faux-texture painting techniques. You can mark your own style by the color selection to match key elements of your furniture or other design accessories.

Brick tile. For a strong and trending element that makes a wow statement for the neighbors to envy, a hard-surface natural material such as natural clay brick tile is a good choice.

Have you noticed that brick acts as a décor statement in many modern restaurants, coffee shops, retail stores and chic building interiors? Thin brick tile, once the secret of interior designers looking to produce character-rich urban commercial design, is now more readily available to homeowners in tile format, making it a hot item in high-end residential homes.

Why the move to the residential sector? Because beyond upgrading our kitchen appliances to commercial grade, we can now mimic the décor and ambiance of a favorite restaurant or urban coffee shop inside our homes by bringing in foundational elements like wall treatments as well as the color palette.

Getting inspiration from your favorite coffee house is just the start; go online to find ideas galore at sites like Pinterest and Houzz.com. Find a look that you like and use it as a blueprint for your home. From classic aged brick walls to painted brick or color glazed brick tile, and unique design styles from farmhouse and shabby chic to ultra-modern luxury, brick is back in a big way.

The good news is you don’t need to live in a brick house to add a designer brick wall inside. With natural clay brick now available in slim tile format, it’s easy to add the beauty of brick almost anywhere because it can be installed like a typical tile product using mortar or simply by attaching individually with construction glue directly on diverse surfaces.

Three areas in the home to add brick accent walls:

Kitchens and dining rooms. Want to turn a kitchen or dining area from ordinary to extraordinary? Historic urban and stylish farmhouse looks can be achieved with natural clay aged brick tile. Prefer modern contemporary? Colorful, glazed slim brick tile is a character-rich alternative to plain subway tile as a backsplash.

Bathrooms. Brick in the bathroom? Yes, with washable and waterproof glazed slim brick tile options, brick is finding its way both onto bathroom walls and walk-in showers.

Home office. Recreate the creative industrial-loft look of a downtown office in your home by adding a “used” style of brick tile as a foundational wall directly behind your office desk.

Laura Hoffman works for Mutual Materials and is a member of Master Builders Association of King and Snohomish Counties, and HomeWork is the group’s weekly column. If you have a home improvement, remodeling or residential homebuilding question you’d like answered by one of the MBA’s more than 2,800 members, write to homework@mbaks.com.

Fried chicken at The Gavel(Photo: J.C. Heithaus/Special to the Naples Daily News)Buy Photo

If you were born in the Midwest, chances are you were born in a town with a restaurant like The Gavel Grill. Generally, it didn’t have a conceived concept such as this neighbor to the Collier County government complex does — just some family patriarch’s name, like Kenny’s or Bill’s or something with an Old World nod like The Wooden Shoe.

The place served food all day, and if you didn’t want to fix it yourself, you would go here, because you could eat any style you wanted. Meals were big enough that your toast or half a burger left the restaurant with you in a napkin. The food was tasty; the coffee was godawful.

At The Gavel Grill, coffee is extremely decent. Otherwise, its three-part daylong dining shows some of the same quirks, both good and not-so, of the restaurants from our formative years.

Breakfast is a high point, updated a bit from Main Street coffee shop days with meals like its garden skillet. Ours included just-right poached eggs over sautéed onions, tomato, green pepper, spinach and mushrooms ($8.95). Throw on a mound of cheese for an extra 70 cents.

There are Greek, meat lover and Popeye (spinach) skillets in that price range as well. Benedicts come in two varieties at $10.95; a third, the lobster benedict, is $12.95. Hotcakes? Of course, with various fruits or chocolate chips, $5.95 to $7.95

The meal we’re aspiring to, however, is the pound cake French toast — a worthy reward for having lost that 15 pounds — with its whipped cream, warm syrup and powdered sugar ($7.95).

Our dining companion has had lunch there and pronounced its BLT well-loaded. But among its 20-plus sandwiches, the grilled chicken-bacon ranch ($10.95) caught our eye. So has the wiener schnitzel sandwich ($10.95) — The Gavel’s version of a pounded, coated, fried pork tenderloin, straight out of Indiana.

Both are around for dinner as well. So are half-pound burgers with various cheeses, plus a black-bean or turkey burger ($8.95-$10.95) and salads from Cobb to Greek to a cherry- and candied pecan-gorgonzola ($8.95 to $10.95).

The Gavel seems to be a favorite of the courthouse crowd, and it caters subtly to that with a few titled meals like the Throw the Book at Them pizza, $9.95 plus 50 cents per topping.

Entertainment is in the evening mix, which prohibits much conversation on most nights. (Wendy Renne on Tuesdays seems to be the most talk-friendly; we would lobby for a quiet guitar night, too.) On this particular Monday evening, the repertoire roamed from Bill Withers to Pink Floyd to Johnny Cash, most of it inhibiting grabbing the waiter’s attention or getting a full explanation of the meal being ordered.

We swapped dishes, and I felt I got the best end of the deal. Laden with chunks of nippy-sweet Italian sausage, peppers, tomato, onion and just a hint of garlic, it was fresh and light-tasting, and still enough for two meals. I might have dusted it with a bit of Parmesan, but none of the waiters could hear me over the lyrics to “Comfortably Numb.”

My dining companion dug into what had been my choice, the house specialty four-piece “honey-stung” fried chicken ($13.95). He inhaled the mashed potatoes and gravy and even worked on his zucchini-squash vegetable sauté. He was being a trooper; he had already sacrificed his craving for the Mom’s Meatloaf entree ($12.95) to try a suggested Italian dish, and had been disappointed in the lack of red sauce.

It may have been made worse by the fact we had ordered Grandma’s Meatball (actually three of them) as appetizer; he had gotten a hint of The Gavel Grill’s rich sauce and a tender pork-beef-veal blend in its meatballs ($7.95). We rarely order red sauce because it’s hard to find a flavorful enough blend, but this one was hearty, with a rich sofrito of garlic, onion, parsley and other herbs.

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Grandma’s Meatball at The Gavel (Photo: J.C. Heithaus/Special to the Naples Daily News)

Garlic bread comes with both, tender inside and with a crunchy crust and lightly herbed.

If you are as desperate to find liver and onions on a menu as I am to avoid it, The Gavel Grill is your place. It’s $12.95 here. If you’re a seafood addict, there are Case Closed crab cakes ($16.95), fish and chips (($11.95) and a honey-almond salmon with potatoes and veggies ($14.95). All come with knife-cut romaine salad (regular or Caesar) as well.

Dessert? Where would you put it?

Dining at The Gavel isn’t an open-and-shut case. We love the fact it had reduced the vast number of TVs that flanked the walls at its predecessor, Chrissy’s, and had scaled them down to two. We weren’t wild about the music dominance and the fact that smoke could waft in from the patio bar on occasion..

But the food was definitely yes-come-back. You won’t need a lawyer for that judgment.

The Gavel Grill

Where: 3340 U.S. 41 E., East Naples, in the Courthouse Shadows shopping center

When: 7 a.m.-11 p.m. Mondays to Saturdays, 7 a.m.-3 p.m. Sundays

Information: 239-316-7683

Rating: 3½ forks

Something else: Full bar; reservations recommended for large groups; an entertainment calendar is on its website

PORT CHESTER, N.Y., Oct. 5, 2017 /PRNewswire/ –Â IRP Design for Kitchens Bath (IRP), a provider of Italian manufactured kitchens and bath fixtures today announced the launch of The Cut Kitchen by IRP. This award-winning design by architect Alessandro Isola and manufactured by Italian kitchen maker, Record e Cucine, allows for greater flexibility in the kitchen module by using reconfigurable sliding units. The Cut Kitchen is available in the Northeast exclusively through IRP.

“We are very excited by the opportunity to partner with Record e Cucine to bring this amazing product to our clients which has already had great success in Europe,” stated Federico Martin, Founder, IRP Design for Kitchens Bath. “The Cut Kitchen offers a new way of thinking about the kitchen that delivers cutting-edge design, functionality, and harmony to one of the most important rooms in a home.”

The Cut Kitchen by IRP allows its users to rotate a part of the kitchen unit to serve various needs and occasions. The parallelepiped sliced horizontally creates two superimposed blocks which rotate and can create primarily three different kitchen configurations. The lightweight look is further accentuated by the movement of the table inserted into a horizontal slot which can slide out horizontally or rotate 90 degrees.

In addition, The Cut Kitchen can incorporate the option of ceiling mounted drawers whereby the drawers descend and once open, remain suspended in a convenient position placing food, condiments, utensils and accessories used in the kitchen within easy reach. Feather-touch sensors gently raise and lower the units, providing not only storage but also surfaces (glass and LEDs) as well as leaving the island’s main worktop clear, clean and tidy always. The modular system features a hood and minimalist lightweight structural frames for storage units with fixed open shelving.

Capable of organizing a complex production process with automated control systems for all phases, numerical control machines and qualified personnel for the highest standards of quality, the company produces modern, classic and masonry kitchens, marked by a true “Made in Italy” style.

SAN ANTONIO, Oct. 05, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — A new analysis by Verify Markets shows the Global Smart Kitchen Appliances Market was valued at $371 million in 2016 and is expected to reach over $2 billion by 2023, growing at a double-digit CAGR during the forecast period. Currently, smart refrigerators dominate the market with more than 50 percent of the market share. Refrigerators were among the first appliances to be enabled with remote connectivity and have been improved upon over the last five years, giving them an edge over other appliances that have been introduced to the market recently.

North America is among the biggest markets with more than 35 percent of the market share. With a large number of early adopters, it is expected to be the fastest growing region for smart kitchen appliances. North America is followed by Europe, where consumer behavior varies across the continent, with Southern Europe being sensitive to price, while the West and the North focus more on design and added services of a product.

Asia Pacific is still an emerging market, but has the fastest growth among all regions towards the end of the forecast period. Consumers in the region are generally more price-sensitive and are weary to purchase premium products that are new to the market. This trend is expected to change over the next few years with an increase in purchasing power and reliance on technology.

Smart kitchen appliances are still a market in its infancy, but this is expected to change in the coming years with an increase in technological integration into everyday consumer lives. The current trend of adopting smart kitchen appliances is only expected to expand to include a wider range of appliances.

Connectivity is not just limited to appliances; cookware, such as pans, is also Wi-Fi enabled. These smart pans can record the different ingredients and its quantity of a personal recipe and then track the cooking style, enabling consumers to store their recipes digitally down to the last ingredient.

Major regions include North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. Major appliances include refrigerators, ovens/ranges, microwaves, coffeemakers and cookers. Some of the key companies covered in this report include Whirlpool Corporation, GE Appliances, BSH HausgerÃ¤te GmbH and Midea Corporation.

As cold weather comes creeping into your life and you begin turning the oven on more than you did last month, make sure you have the right pots and pans for the job. Stock up by taking advantage of all the pre-winter sales on kitchen essentials. Up first: Dutch ovens.

One of our favorite cast-iron cookware makers, Staub, has a ton of products on sale over at One Kings Lane right now. The Alsatian French brand is known for its cocottes, or what most of us call Dutch ovens. These enameled pots have the rare combination of being luxurious and functional—you can braise meat in it for hours and then transfer it directly to the table because it looks that nice (just don’t forget a trivet!).

From the Staub sale items, we recommend the 7-qt oval cocotte, an ideal size for family-style meals (marked down to $350 from $500), or the smaller 4-qt cozy cocotte (marked down to $150 from $275), whose circular base sits perfectly atop stovetop burners, though the 4-qt is also a good size for making BA’s best bread recipe.

Need.

Probably the most fun part of choosing a Staub Dutch oven is the color, and luckily the sale covers appealing warm tones like grenadine red, dark blue, and basil green. And if you’re feeling extra French, go for this cocotte with an escargot snail top handle. That last one isn’t on sale, but we’ll keep our eyes peeled for when it is.

The One-Pot Dish for Every Dinner Party:

Ask any chef or great home cook what’s on their list of kitchen essentials, and you’ll undeniably hear three little words over and over again: cast iron skillet. While you can find one of the evenly heating, built-to-last wonders just about anywhere, the one the Internet writ large seems to like best is the ultra lightweight model from Field Company. And as luck would have it, the 10.5” model is on sale on Huckberry right now.

The skillet, which raised $1.6 million on Kickstarter before its launch, goes for a pretty reasonable $100 at full price, but Huckberry is offering it for $89.98. At either price, the skillet is an investment not only in your culinary prowess, but also in American manufacturing and sustainability: each skillet is forged in the USA, and each is made from between 75 to 90 percent recycled iron.

And even though they weigh a lot less than options than you’ll find from other kitchen outfitters, it’s just as durable as its heavier cousins (Field Company backs all of its skillets with a lifetime warrantee) and it does just as much. Because it comes pre-seasoned, you can do everything from scrambling eggs to sear steak right out of the box. Take good care of it (check out Field Company’s guide to doing just that) and this might be the last pan you ever guy.